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Bike commuting soars, but what about 'bikeism'?

November 3, 2008

Posted by Scott Dodd in Living Sustainably

Tags:

bikecommuting, globalwarming, newyorkcity, publichealth, transportation

The New York City Department of Transportation announced last week that bike commuting jumped 35 percent in the city over the past year. That's a lot of new bikers on the streets, and I'm proud to be one of them. (I might even be included in the new numbers, since one of the spots where the DOT counted cyclists was the Hudson River Greenway, which I take to work.)

Throughout the summer, as gas prices soared, news stories trumpeted an increase in bike commuting and public transit ridership -- anything that didn't involve filling up a gas tank. Now that prices are going back down, many people have been returning to their old habits, but I hope that many of the new bikers decide to keep pedaling.

Not only is it healthier for people, better for their communities and good for the environment, but recent studies show that as more people bike, it gets safer  -- scientific validation for the old safety in numbers argument.

If you've got more bikers on the street, the theory goes, drivers get more used to seeing them and adjust their behavior accordingly. Bikes are seen as a normal part of the road -- as they should be -- instead of an odd intrusion, and drivers know how to react to them.

Still, it's not hard to make a counter argument: With more bikes on the streets of New York and other cities this summer, it often seemed that drivers got more frustrated and hostile. (It certainly led to a lot of online rants against cyclists.) After a police officer assaulted a biker in Times Square and got caught on video, I was inspired to ask the question, "What's with all the bike hate?"

Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote the insightful book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, examined that question in a recent blog post, focusing on the concept that an Australian writer calls "bikeism." It's defined as:

Tarring an entire class of people with the extreme acts committed by a few (or a stereotypical image of that behavior). "Unfortunately, many motorists who don't ride bikes and don't understand cycling seem to think that all cyclists are ego-driven menaces who run red lights."

Vanderbilt looks at a study called "Drivers' Perceptions of Cyclists " prepared by the U.K.'s Transport Research Laboratory. The report details a number of problems that might be blamed for bike hostility, from the poor understanding that drivers have of bikers' rights to the concept of a "road user hierarchy." (Guess who ranks at the bottom of that hierarchy in a typical driver's mind?)

On the concept of "bikeism," Vanderbilt says the report suggest that drivers are guilty of stereotyping bikers in much the same way that other societal "out groups" have been marginalized. In other words, you see one cyclist run a red light, and you attribute that behavior to all cyclists -- in a way that you wouldn't see one driver speeding through a crosswalk and assume that all drivers are pedestrian-hating scofflaws.

Vanderbilt doesn't conclude that "bikeism" in fact exists, but the idea clearly intrigues him, and I agree. It certainly explains a lot of the negative feelings toward bikers, which seem all out of proportion to the actual risk they pose on the road -- as opposed to, say, multi-ton metal vehicles fired by fossil fuel-burning engines.

Let's hope that the "safety in numbers" theory is right, and that as more riders take to the streets, "bikeism" gets kicked to the curb where it belongs.

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